Menu

A History of Victorian Literature (Blackwell History of by James Eli Adams

By James Eli Adams

Incorporating a wide variety of latest scholarship, A historical past of Victorian Literature offers an summary of the literature produced in nice Britain among 1830 and 1900, with clean attention of either significant figures and a few of the era's much less everyday authors. a part of the Blackwell Histories of Literature sequence, the e-book describes the advance of the Victorian literary circulation and locations it inside of its cultural, social and political context.A wide-ranging narrative evaluate of literature in nice Britain among 1830 and 1900, taking pictures the extreme number of literary output produced in this eraAnalyzes the improvement of all literary kinds in this interval - the radical, poetry, drama, autobiography and significant prose - along with significant advancements in social and highbrow historyConsiders the ways that writers engaged with new different types of social accountability of their paintings, as Britain remodeled into the world's first business economyOffers a clean standpoint at the paintings of either significant figures and a few of the era?s much less normal authors

The sensational narratives of John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas resort verified prose fiction as an self sufficient style within the past due 16th century. The texts they created are a paradoxical combination of outrageous plotting and rhetorical sophistication, low and high tradition. even though their works have been feverishly wolfed by way of modern readers, those writers tend to be simply identified to scholars as resources for Shakespearean comedy.

This comparative research attracts on working-class autobiography, public and boarding college memoirs, and the canonical autobiographies through men and women within the uk to outline subjectivity and price inside of social type and gender in 19th- and early twentieth-century Britain. Gagnier reconsiders conventional differences among brain and physique, inner most hope and public strong, aesthetics and software, and truth and cost within the context of lifestyle.

It's always inspiration that the varied contradictory views in Margaret Cavendish's writings display her lack of ability to reconcile her feminism together with her conservative, royalist politics. during this e-book Lisa Walters demanding situations this view and demonstrates that Cavendish's rules extra heavily resemble republican notion, and that her method is the root for subversive political, clinical and gender theories.

Additional info for A History of Victorian Literature (Blackwell History of Literature)

Example text

174). The book began as an attack on the dandy, the icon of an enervated aristocracy oblivious to the suffering around it. But Carlyle also saw in the trope of clothing and fashion a figure for the force of history, in particular, the incessant transformation of human beliefs and institutions. Humankind is always struggling to find adequate vesture, in Carlyle’s terms, for its beliefs – vesture which culminates in their conception of divinity. ” (Carlyle 1908: 49). The trope has a long literary history – witness King Lear – but it took on added topicality through the revolutionary sans-culottes in France, a precedent still haunting England in 1832.

Home” readily extended beyond the hearth, however, to embrace England itself, whose distinction could be evoked in turn through juxtaposition with a much wider world, not merely as a space of difference, but as a realm increasingly under English dominion. In this light, home in Hemans’s poetry could be more than the cozy nest of so much later Victorian fantasy; it was a realm within which the obscure, seemingly self-abnegating lives of women – their love, their devotion, and the grief that underscored those – resonated with larger political struggles.

In effect, he had come to Carlyle’s conclusion that Logic is always saying No. His emergence from the depression, Mill recalls, gave him a new appreciation for what he calls Carlyle’s “anti-self-consciousness theory”: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. 145–7). Mill drew from this ordeal a new appreciation for “the internal culture of the individual,” which Bentham had failed to recognize. indd 32 12/29/2008 3:15:55 PM Literature in the Age of Machinery, 1830–1850 33 incorporate his new attention to emotional life in a revisionist view of Benthamism, which he most fully developed in pendant essays on Bentham and Coleridge.